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To zero in on the offset, I'd fundamentally described it already in my review of Chris Sommovigo's latest budget wonder, the Black Cat Silverstar USB leash. Quoting from myself—a nice change from seeing an isolated sentence or turn of phrase quoted in an advert—"'it's easiest to hear with bright edgy recordings which suffer from pixilation effects. If you've ever worked in Photoshop, you know how its 'sharpen' command increases edge contrast by upping lightness at the transitions. What should be gradual gets whitish. Overdo it and very quickly these transitions stand out most unnaturally like pimples on skin. With our aural equivalents any reduction of hyper edging is easily heard. It telegraphs as smoother, rounder and mellower. A good catch-all for the overall effect is more organic. Back to Photoshop. Start out with a tripod-captured perfectly focused shot to give us high native resolution without any need for post-production fixes. Now the same sharpen command becomes much harder to spot. It's essentially redundant. The same goes for better recordings. That's why it's easiest to take 'dirty' tracks to familiarize yourself with this type of presentational difference. Once you know what to listen for—it's got nothing to do with frequency response—you'll also recognize it on better recordings. There it simply gets more subtle, contextual and gestalt- rather than incident-based."

I'd also said that "the Silverstar played it a bit fuller, smoother, rounder and more relaxed". None of these are qualities conventional measurements per se depict. Because the converter which one might assume was predominantly or solely responsible for SQ remained unchanged—just fed BNC versus AES/EBU—this sonic upgrade should reflect lower jitter. When CD players first split in twain to send native I²S signal as serial S/PDIF over a cable, transmission-induced jitter became a known quantity. What was supposed to be a sonic improvement (separating transport and DAC) caused a new problem. Computer audio is no different. Though the signal remains in the digital domain until it encounters the converter chips outside the PC/server to presumably be perfectly robust and impervious until then, lower transmission jitter and noise associated with the digital signal still manifest in the conversion process despite all its fancy reclocking. This is no different than how superior legacy transports from Esoteric and C.E.C. improved sonics with spinning discs.

My reaction to a virtual rerun of earlier CD transport observations now for PCfi was admittedly split. I appreciated how Aurender's extreme measures for their digital transport did net an audible improvement. On their behalf I was disappointed by how small this difference was. On my iMac's behalf I was tickled by how onboard segregation—iTunes library on 2TB HHD, OSX and media player on 256GB SSD, memory buffering in 16GB RAM—plus high-quality USB-to-AES/EBU conversion (battery-powered, super-clock'd) left so little under the table. From a visit by Absolue Création's Frenchmen to demo their very expensive cables as a complete loom in situ last year, I already knew how I could pursue equivalently flavored yet bigger changes from costlier cables sans WiFi.

I'd turned down Absolue's review request because I didn't find the cost/return equation attractive enough. For exactly the same reason I'd have turned down today's request had I been given a prior in-home demo. Knowing upfront of the WiFi angle, I'd agreed because I felt professionally motivated. Was my computer source still up to par? Or had it been - um, rendered sonically obsolete by this latest generation of cost-no-object servers? My answer to this you already know. Even were WiFi no issue because the W20 came with a hardwired tablet remote, it wouldn't change. Aurender's asking price is simply out of proportion to sonic payback. I also find the absence of an onboard ripper deplorable. At least to my mind the core rationale of an audiophile server is eliminating a computer for music. Aurender doesn't. Even a cheap external disc drive still relies on an attached operating system to be accessed. If you continue to buy new music, you will continue to need a computer to use the W20. That's ridiculous. Sadly Aurender hasn't improved my bad attitude toward the entire audiophile music server genre. I still feel like an old dog dreaming of new tricks. But as StereoSound's award for the W20 demonstrates, that clearly makes me a fringe case. Time for the amber.

Parting words. If Aurender's €15'000 W20 is representative of the best current servers—I don't know—it would seem to take a lot of engineering effort to improve just minorly upon a current quad-core Mac computer properly set up to do only music. To work in lieu of a computer whereby online music downloads, meta-data editing, backup protocols and ripping are integrated into a single dedicated hifi component still seems future talk. With the huge biz of IT and its ever escalating popularity of wireless services, reliance on wireless tablets for library access is an obvious convenience for makers of audiophile servers. It's the way the future is set. These servers just plug into it. Why reinvent the wheel? WiFi-intolerant fossils like yours truly simply have little to no say in it. To be contrarian like ownership of this site affords me for a mini blip on the screen, I wish someone as serious about engineering as Aurender would give us another option. I also wish they'd install in their server a fully functioning operating system. Only that would realize the server promise to truly replace a computer, not just lazily coat-tail on one. But one can always hope. For a completely different take on this subject and proper balance, refer to our prior review of the Lumin music server by French contributor Joël Chevassus. It'll show that for every nay there is a yeah, for each hesitation an enthusiastic conviction...
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